On mapping stochastic processes into hardware and its application on ATM traffic emulation

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) traffic emulators have been designed for demonstrating the performance of various protocols and services in ATM networks under user-defined traffic conditions. Analytical tools and traffic measurements show that specific traffic conditions can be emulated by using the superposition of various stochastic processes. This paper presents a generic method for implementing stochastic processes using dedicated hardware and describes how this method has been used for implementing a real-time traffic emulator of ATM virtual channels.